The Star TribuneMunicipal workers left Minneapolis after the city changed its residency requirement 10 years ago, but no one today seems to notice it. But that city has experienced growth, unlike Cleveland.

MINNEAPOLIS -- There was no shortage of worry and fear in Minneapolis back in 1999, when Minnesota lawmakers overturned the city's requirement that municipal employees live within city limits.

Those who fought to save Minneapolis' residency requirement warned that middle-class workers would flee the city in droves and leave behind a vacuum sprinkled with For Sale signs.

A decade later, as Cleveland finds itself in a similar situation, two things have become apparent in Minneapolis.

First, some of those fears seem to have come true: The percentage of municipal workers who live and work in Minneapolis today is less than half what it was 10 years ago.

However, the second phenomenon is that few people seem to notice it anymore, or at least don't voice concerns about it.

"I think there was some exodus, but . . . I haven't heard anything about it in the longest time," said Bill Gerst, vice president of public affairs for the Minneapolis Area Board of Realtors. "The issue just kind of went away.

"It was one of those issues where, when you look back on it, it was very volatile at the time," he added, "but after a pretty short period of time, it was just gone."

Minneapolis' experience -- though far from directly comparable to Cleveland's -- offers some hope that whatever wounds the city incurs by the abolition of its residency rule might heal quickly and painlessly.

This month, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld a 2006 state law that banned municipal residency laws in Cleveland, Akron and about 130 other cities and villages.

In Cleveland, which is the largest affected city, Mayor Frank Jackson had insisted for three years that the legislature's act was unconstitutional, and he fired four city workers who moved to the suburbs. But last week, he capitulated and pledged the city will abide by the court's ruling. Jackson also predicted Cleveland will adjust and thrive.

Minneapolis has.

According to the Star-Tribune, Minneapolis' hometown newspaper, about 68 percent of the city's municipal employees lived within city limits in 1999, when a cadre of suburban and out-state legislators vacated Minneapolis' six-year-old residency requirement. Today, according to city payroll figures, only 30 percent of employees live where they work.

Said Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek, who was a Minneapolis police captain and a state legislator when he helped orchestrate the repeal: "People just don't want to be told where to live -- whether it's a condition of the job or not."

Yet in Minneapolis, those city workers who fled were replaced by plenty of newcomers. The city's population grew by more than 5,000 between 2000 and 2007, to about 390,000. It's expected to keep growing, too -- to 435,000 over the ensuing 20 years, according to a regional planning, public-works and tax-sharing entity called the Metropolitan Council.

Minneapolis also retains its allure to the middle class, especially in its vibrant downtown residential district of 30,000-plus dwellers and the upscale neighborhoods around its chain of gleaming urban lakes and the University of Minnesota. The city is also the hub of a booming metro region that in the last seven years has added 200,000 people -- roughly the equivalent of Solon, Westlake, Hudson, Parma and Mentor combined.

Cleveland, meanwhile, lost eight residents for every one Minneapolis gained, and the loss of its residency rule could deal a harder hurt. Minneapolis' rule affected only about 800 workers hired during its six years of existence -- the rest of the city's workforce of about 5,000 was grandfathered in. Cleveland's residency rule applies to almost everyone the city has hired over the last 27 years -- some 8,000 workers in all.

Many Cleveland City Council members and other civic officials have openly fretted that the city will suffer greatly. Councilman Michael Polensek predicted a further 10 percent decline in Cleveland property values.

The refrain was similar in Minneapolis a decade earlier. A coalition of suburban and rural lawmakers ganged up on the Twin Cities (St. Paul also had a residency rule but applied it only to executive employees) and accused them of "shackling" their workers. One suburban state representative called the residency rules "communist" and blasted Minneapolis as "Moscow on the Mississippi.

But Wes Skoglund, who then was a Democratic state senator from Minneapolis, warned that eviscerating his hometown's live-where-you-work rule would be a bad mistake.

Skoglund, who retired from a 30-year legislative career in 2006, concedes he was wrong on one level. The flight of city workers -- most noticeably police -- was more like a gradual evaporation than a sudden stampede, and he doesn't recall any plunge in property values.

On the other hand, Skoglund says he has been sadly vindicated. The city has been left with many police from suburbia or beyond who see themselves as an occupying force.

"There are absolutely some cops who see it as their responsibility to come in and supervise us," the ex-lawmaker fumed recently. "That's not their job at all.

"We have officers who have never been in a local store except to arrest somebody and have never gone for a walk in our parks unless they were chasing somebody. People who have never been to a movie in Minneapolis, or eaten a meal in a restaurant here, are coming into town to supervise us. These are people who did not grow up around a single person who did not look like them."

Stanek, who spearheaded the repeal, said he did so with the tacit approval of the same Minneapolis officials who publicly denounced him. The city, he said, was finding that the residency rule was impeding its ability to recruit good workers -- especially police.

"The majority of council wanted it repealed, but they didn't have the political courage to do it," Stanek said. "So I didn't really run into any opposition."

Skoglund opposed then, and still does in retirement. Everything "didn't fall apart" in the city, the veteran lawmaker conceded, but things would be better if city employees lived where they work.

"It was a good law -- we actually had police officers living in our neighborhoods," Skoglund said. "I don't know who wouldn't want to have a cop on their block -- I know I would. And we lost them."